2015 Lakewood Cider Days

This year’s Lakewood Cider Days featured a hard cider tasting event by the cideries of the Rocky Mountain Cider Association. Over 50 ciders were featured–the largest ever selection at an event in Colorado. I tried many of them, and you get to hear about it…

The Event

Lakewood Cider Days has been running for a number of years now in Lakewood, CO–for the most part it’s a kid-friendly harvest festival featuring tractors, animals, cider pressing, food vendors, and booths staffed by local businesses and organizations.

For the last few years, however, the Rocky Mountain Cider Association has been holding a (hard) cider tasting as an event-within-an-event at Cider Days, and it’s been growing in cider selection and attendance. This year’s event kept up the momentum and was the most exciting yet.

In attendance were some of the Colorado cider mainstays like Colorado Cider Company and Stem Ciders, but also some new cideries of note such as Colorado Common and Talbott’s Cider Company, the latter of which showed up with interesting hopped and dry ciders right out of the gate. Clearly, the cider industry is growing in Colorado, and I think we can expect more entrants, more changes and an expanded selection going forward. It’s a good time to be a cider fan in Colorado.

Also pouring at the event were two distributors, Elite Brands and Crooked Stave Artisans Distributing, who bring ciders from various states and countries into Colorado, and Shelton Brothers, who imports ciders from the U.K., New Zealand, France, and Spain. These groups contributed significantly to the breadth of styles and flavors available to tasters at the event.

The Ciders

The breadth of ciders at the tasting event was significant. Of note for me were:

Many of those I missed, I’d recently tried at the 2015 Colorado Cider Circus, however–see my write-up on that event here.

The Hopped Ciders

Since there were so many hopped ciders represented–and since I’ve been devoting some my own cidermaking time to hopped ciders lately–I decided to spend much of my attention at the event to that category. My general take on the category is that hopped ciders are all about the aroma–as ciders are dry-hopped, they aren’t taking up the bittering acids of hops as much as they do in beer, so using them becomes a matter of applying the right aromatic components in the right proportions to complement the underlying cider.

With a few notable exceptions, the hopped ciders at the event–and those that I’ve encountered in general–tend to be semi-sweet ciders made from table apples with the addition of a floral hop such as Cascade. That formula works pretty well, though for me the sweetness tends to mask the delicate hop finish that is so much of the experience in a good hopped cider. It’s the very dry, crisp ciders with a lot of hop aromatics that work the best for me in the hopped category, as the hops really stand out and make the underlying cider more appealing.

For me, Harvest Hop by Branch Out cider was the best hopped cider of the event, with a ton of fresh hop aroma above a complex, minerally, bone dry cider that finished clean, allowing the hops to linger. Very well done, guys!

I think the small batch sizes and use of fresh local hops at Branch Out allowed them to pack a lot more hop aromatics into Harvest Hop than would be consistently possible to produce on a larger commercial scale on a regular basis. Therein lies one of the challenges in the cider world: How does one scale up production and make cider year-round while maintaining quality? It’s not an easy task.

Nonetheless, Stem Ciders manages to consistently do so with their dry, dry-hopped cider, Remedy, which is one of my go-to ciders and a close second for me in terms of the hopped ciders at Cider Days.

Also of note was Talbott’s IPC Hopped Cider, which is fermented with beer yeasts, resulting in a complex, slightly spicy, semi-sweet cider to which hops are added. That yeast complexity makes it unique and interesting, if not quite as crisp as some of the drier, wine yeast-fermented offerings.

The People

Did I mention that cider people are interesting people? Quirky, perhaps, but generally fun to talk to. I tend to gravitate toward those experienced cider folks who are happy to share their deep knowledge of cidermaking, of apple growing–even the ins and outs of running a cidery–and I’m grateful for all the fascinating information that they freely give, both at these events and in general.

By and large, the cider community is an open community, so if you’re at one of these events, be sure you spend some time talking to the folks behind the tables and asking about the origins of different ciders and cideries–you’ll be fascinated by what you learn.

Wrap-Up

All in all, I had a great time at Cider Days and look forward to next year’s event. If history is any indicator, it will continue to grow, improve, and expand its cider selection ever further, reflecting the growth and creativity of the industry in general. If you’re in the area in early October, put this one on your list…you won’t regret it.

Were you at Cider Days? If so, what were your impressions? Leave a comment below.

2 Comments on 2015 Lakewood Cider Days

Thanks for sharing! Lots of CO ciders we don’t get here in WA. Eden Sparkling Dry cider is awesome! I got to try it in the company of one of the cidermakers (Eleanor) when she was in Seattle for Cider Summit this year, so it was a special treat. Their ice cider is also amazing, but completely on the other end of the dry-sweet spectrum.